A Bark and Stormy Night: Ann Radcliffe’s Animals

Abstract

Considering the presence of animals, wild and domesticated, against the figure of the imperilled heroine in the late eighteenth-century fiction of Ann Radcliffe, this chapter discusses four early Gothic novels: A Sicilian Romance (1790); The Romance of the Forest (1791); The Mysteries of Udolpho (1795); The Italian (1797). Within these narratives, tensions of solitude and wilderness are broken by dogs and Radcliffe’s protagonists experience the comforting and protective presence of companion animals, through which characters demonstrate their affinity to the natural world and adherence to the period’s ethos of moral sensibility. Building on extant scholarship on late eighteenth-century sentimental fiction and the animal, this chapter presses the specifically Gothic aspects of animal–human relations. Ladd argues that while animals in Radcliffe’s novels mirror and otherwise highlight characters’ emotional and aesthetic sensitivities, they also show the centrality of fear in the Gothic genre, a fear that is never far from paternal or predatory patriarchal masculinity.